8. Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Section 10; cf. Chapter 1 above.
9. Plato, Euthyphro. The exact force of “the Euthyphro dilemma” is considered in Chapter 10 of my Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.
10. Matthew 9:13. The passage from Luther is quoted by James on pp. 244–245 of The Varieties of Religious Experience (see n. 1 to Chapter 10, Chapter 25, above) and the story about Dr. Channing in no. 1 on Chapter 45 of the same work.
11. E.g., On the Jews and their Lies, in Vol. 47 of Luther’s Works, edited by H. T. Lehman (Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1971), pp. 121–306, recommends the burning of synagogues and of the Jews’ houses, confiscation of their books, forbidding of worship and teaching, or alternatively expulsion of the Jews from the country.
12. E.g. Joshua 8, 10, and 11; Samuel 15.
13. De Rerum Natura, Book I, line 101.
14. See pp. 193–195 of Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, and the article mentioned in no. 4 above.
15. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Part XII.
16. The Prince, Chapter 25.
1. Intelligent design has been unkindly described as creationism in a cheap tuxedo.
2. Classical Latin and Greek were better equipped. Latin Homo (Greek anthropo-) means human, as opposed to vir (andro-) which means man, and femina (gyne- ) which means woman. Thus anthropology pertains to all humanity, where andrology and gyne cology are sexually exclusive branches of medicine.
3. There is an example in fiction. The children’s writer Philip Pullman, in His Dark Materials, imagines a species of animals, the “mulefa,” that co-exist with trees that produce perfectly round seedpods with a hole in the centre. These pods the mulefa adopt as wheels. The wheels, not being part of the body, have no nerves or blood vessels to get twisted around the “axle” (a strong claw of horn or bone). Pullman perceptively notes an additional point: the system works only because the planet is paved with natural basalt ribbons, which serve as “roads.” Wheels are no good over rough country.
4. Fascinatingly, the muscle principle is deployed in yet a third mode in some insects such as flies, bees, and bugs, in which the flight muscle is intrinsically oscillatory, like a reciprocating engine. Whereas other insects such as locusts send nervous instructions for each wing stroke (as a bird does), bees send an instruction to switch on (or switch off) the oscillatory motor. Bacteria have a mechanism which is neither a simple contractor (like a bird’s flight muscle) nor a reciprocator (like a bee’s flight muscle), but a true rotator: in that respect it is like an electric motor or a Wankel engine.
